Film Review - See You Soon

A diner booth becomes a confessional in Jay Pendarvis Jr.’s See You, Soon, a compact but emotionally ambitious short that examines the dangerous distance between suffering and speaking. Starring Asante Blackk and Isaiah John, the film centers on two brothers whose seemingly ordinary late-night conversation gradually reveals a far more painful purpose. 

The premise is deliberately spare. A young man sits across from his older brother, discussing life while waiting for someone to arrive. Yet from the outset, the scene carries an uneasy stillness. Familiar jokes and brotherly exchanges provide temporary shelter from the subject neither character is fully prepared to confront: the grief, guilt and anger that have consumed Amari since his brother’s death.

Pendarvis understands that grief does not always announce itself through visible collapse. Sometimes it appears as restlessness, silence or an urgent need to act before the pain can be understood. See You, Soon is less interested in mourning as a single emotional state than in the choices grief can provoke when it is endured in isolation. The film’s tension comes from recognizing that Amari is not simply remembering a loss; he may be standing on the edge of a decision shaped by it.

The diner setting proves essential to that tension. Public yet strangely intimate, it is the sort of place where the world continues moving while two people experience something private and life-altering. The film strips away visual spectacle and elaborate plotting, forcing attention onto the actors’ faces, the rhythm of their exchanges and the meanings concealed inside apparently casual remarks. The restraint gives every pause the potential weight of a confession.

Blackk brings a volatile sensitivity to Amari. His performance holds grief and anger in an unstable balance, suggesting a young man desperate to appear composed even as his emotions threaten to harden into something destructive. He communicates the character’s pain most persuasively through resistance: the words he avoids, the feelings he minimizes and the vulnerability he treats almost as an adversary.

John provides the film with its emotional counterforce. His performance carries the familiarity of an older brother who knows when Amari is deflecting, but also understands that forcing an admission may close him off completely. The actors establish a convincing sibling shorthand—a mixture of affection, frustration and unfinished history—that allows the film to suggest an entire relationship within a limited running time.

Their chemistry prevents the film from becoming merely an exercise in grief-themed dialogue. The conversation feels personal because it contains the contradictions common to close family relationships. The brothers can comfort and challenge each other in the same breath. Humor appears not because the situation lacks seriousness, but because joking is sometimes the last defense available when direct honesty feels unbearable.

Pendarvis has said the story was shaped by his own encounters with loss and by his interest in the difference between an anticipated death and one that occurs suddenly, particularly through violence. That personal foundation can be felt in the film’s refusal to tidy grief into an easily digestible lesson. 

Instead, See You, Soon asks what can happen when mourning becomes entangled with guilt, masculinity and the expectation that pain should be handled privately. Amari’s emotional isolation is not presented as stoicism but as a mounting danger. The film recognizes that silence can feel protective while gradually severing a person from the relationships most capable of keeping him grounded.

There is also a larger social reality beneath the brothers’ exchange. Violent loss does not conclude with the event itself; it reverberates through families and communities, shaping the lives of those left behind. By concentrating on the aftermath rather than the violence, Pendarvis avoids sensationalism. The question is not simply what happened to these brothers, but what Amari will allow that loss to make of him.

The title gains force as the story unfolds. “See you soon” can be a casual promise, a farewell or something far more troubling. Pendarvis allows those meanings to overlap, turning an everyday phrase into an expression of longing and unresolved danger. The film’s deepest unease comes from the possibility that grief has altered Amari’s understanding of reunion.

Although conceived as a proof of concept for Pendarvis’ planned feature Brother’s Keeper, See You, Soon does not feel like an incomplete fragment. Its narrow dramatic frame is purposeful, capturing a decisive emotional encounter rather than attempting to explain every part of its characters’ history. The proposed feature may widen this world, but the short already demonstrates Pendarvis’ command of performance-driven storytelling. 

What lingers is the film’s belief that connection can interrupt the momentum of despair. It does not suggest that one conversation can erase trauma or resolve grief. It argues for something more modest and perhaps more truthful: that being seen by another person may create enough space to reconsider what comes next.

Intimate, tense, and sensitively performed, See You, Soon transforms a conversation between brothers into a reckoning with the ways loss can distort love into guilt and pain into action. Its power lies not in offering easy healing, but in recognizing the precise moment when silence must finally give way to human connection.